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Photo-based social media platform - Instagram - has more than 600M active users per month. With 70M new photos uploaded each day. That's EACH DAY!!!
To control this mass of information. To manage it and make it work for you. You’re seriously going to need Instagram analytics tools. It's unavoidable. I've put together a list of the best... but first...
I'm going to introduce you to the best of the best Instagram analytics tools. Even following the latest Instagram API changes, Talkwalker still provides the best Instagram analytics on the market.
Talkwalker Analytics - Ferrari's Instagram engagement for last 30 days.
Free demo of The best Instagram Analytics tool!
Ferrari would be wise to investigate spikes in engagement - August 17 - as they could indicate a PR disaster building up. In this instance, the spike is due to the buzz surrounding the first Formula 1 race following the summer break.
Why bother with Instagram analytics?
Simple answer... to improve your content strategy.
Instagram analytics is way more than identifying which photo, video, or story performed well. If you want a rocking Instagram content strategy, you have to understand how or if your content is working. Is it resonating with your followers? Pulling out data with an analytics tool will give you insights into how your followers behave. A/B testing your images is a great way to find what's going to bring the most engagement.
- Black & white vs full color
- Exterior vs interior
- Humans vs animals
- Abstract vs reality
The results of your A/B testing will reveal engagement data such as likes, comments, clicks. You'll know which product shots work, and which don't.
Ferrari looking good - use sentiment analysis to dodge a PR diaster bullet.
Digging into Instagram analytics will show you what your audience is interested in. What it wants, what it likes. leading to improved content, more traffic, increased ROI.
- What type of posts work best?
- what time of day is your audience online?
- What days are best for optimal reach?
Any clue?
How do I tracking Instagram metrics?
Before you start rewriting all your content, you need to get to know your audience. Dig deep into Instagram analytics and check out the demographics of your followers.
- Location - if your audience is global, time zones have to be taken into account when posting your content. Do you have followers speaking languages other than English?
- Age - old or young, style your content accordingly
- Gender - who are you talking to?
- Engagement peaks - schedule your content for when your audience is at their most lively. Time of the day, days of the week.
Ferrari language distribution - tailor your content accordingly.
What metrics should I track in Instagram?
Before you start using Instagram analytics tools to track your performance, you need to confirm your business goals. What you want to achieve by using Instagram. Are you looking to grow your community? Measure the impact your posts are having? Track the performance of a boosted post, ad, or competition?
Metrics to track can include:
- Calls - followers using the call button
- Email - sent using the built-in button
- Texts - using the sent text button
- Reach - unique users having viewed your content
- Engagement - unique accounts liking, commenting, saving
- Engagement rate - percentage of followers that have engaged
- Impressions - times your content was seen
- Comments - how many
- Likes - how many
- Followers - won or lost for a certain period
- Saved - how many saved your content?
- Website - site visitors coming via Instagram
Okay, I think you're ready. Let's look at some Instagram analytics tools.
Instagram analytics tools
Talkwalker Analytics - monitor, track, identify
This post is specifically about tools that track Instagram analytics. The Talkwalker Analytics platform covers Instagram, and more - social media networks, blogs, print, TV, radio, news sites, forums. With global coverage, it tracks in 1987 languages.
Talkwalker Analytics - social media networks, forums, news sites, blogs, TV, radio, etc.
Proprietary image recognition technology comes with a database that contains 30,000+ logos - increasing daily. It also tracks scenes and objects.
Using advanced AI, sentiment analysis brings up results with 90% accuracy. Finding the true meaning behind consumers' content.
These features, and more, ensure your Instagram marketing strategy goes hand in hand with Instagram analytics. Sweet!
The following list looks at great Instagram analytics tools currently on the market, along with comments from experts.
Iconosquare - measure, understand, improve
Monitor follower growth, weekly/monthly email reports, and more.
Using Instagram for business, it’s useful to be able to track your performance so you can find ways to improve. Iconosquare is a great Facebook and Instagram analytics tool. It’s designed to help you monitor your Instagram account and identify ways to boost performance, such as maximizing interaction with your posts.
Cool feature, you can set it up so you receive email updates with a summary of all the metrics.
With this Instagram analytics tool you can:
- Target your top followers
- Discover followers' and fans' languages, locations, and demographics of your followers and fans - only available for Instagram business profiles
- Find out when your followers are online so you know the best time to post
- Identify what your followers like most - their interests - and target your content
- Find hashtags that relate to your content and your followers to increase engagement
- For each post, monitor how many followers you lose or gain - only available for business profiles
- Monitor your posts on a daily basis - tweak to improve
- Track competitors with business profiles - varies based on permissions
Free Instagram analytics tool - actionable tips on improving your Instagram performance.
Iconosquare offers different price plans, depending on what you want to track and the volume. Looking at the features of this Instagram analytics tool, it’s absolutely worth considering. If you’re in two minds, sign up for a 14-day free trial and give it a whirl.
“Iconosquare is a helpful, all-in-one desktop application for small to mid-sized businesses. The tool enables you to conduct hashtag and user searches, respond to users’ posts and comments, determine which followers are following you back, and check the analytics of your Instagram account. The “contests” tab also gives you great real-world ideas to inspire your business’ own Instagram contest.”
Lisa Kalner Williams (@kalnerwilliams) from Sierra Tierra Marketing
Keyhole - simple social stats
Track all posts with hashtags and keywords in real-time on Twitter and Instagram.
Keyhole provides real-time metrics for Instagram to inspire your social campaigns, content, and digital marketing strategy. Oh, it also provides the metrics for Twitter and Facebook. It’s one of the Instagram analytics tools that’s gradually increasing the social networks that it can monitor. Give it a go, it's worth it!
In real-time, you can track URLs, hashtags, keywords, and @mentions. You can also monitor posts that contain your hashtag choices and keywords. Keyhole provides basic social metrics on one user-friendly and real-time dashboard, and you can receive email reports that summarize all your metrics. You’ll receive a graphic showing the total number of posts and engagement rate generated by your hashtags.
And more, you’ll also be able to identify your most shared tweets, there’s a world map of topic mentions, and a theme cloud.
Monitor your brand posts and optimize your content strategy, growth, and engagement.
Keyhole is a hugely popular analytics tool. Unfortunately, this means that there’s no longer a free version. But, it’s a tool worth trying and if you access Keyhole’s Professional Plan, you’ll get a three-day free trial.
“Keyhole has become one of our favorite social media tracking tools. It provides us with real-time tracks of social activities based on keywords, hashtags, or URL. It helps us understand our community better so that we can identify those who support us and those who engage with us.”
Karlyn Bishop (@vB_Mama) on thesocialmediapanel.com
Later - optimize engagement
Later (formerly known as Latergramme) is a top-ranking visual content marketing platform. It allows you to aggregate and plan your content, increase your audience, and share photos and videos.
Plan and schedule your Instagram posts.
In March 2017, Later introduced free Instagram analytics tools to all users. Paid users were provided with Pro Instagram Analytics. The free analytics tool lets you optimize your Instagram engagement and boost your likes.
Understand how your posts are performing and identify which ones are getting the most engagement. In your Instagram account summary, you’ll find the number of likes and comments for each post over the previous three months. Included is your top post, plus the average number of likes and comments per post.
Find what's working and what's not, to optimize your Instagram marketing campaigns.
Later has a great blog, offering tips and tricks on getting the best out of Instagram. It covers topics such as which hashtags to use, recommended stock photo websites, using slideshows, how to post from a PC or a Mac, understanding the built-in Instagram analytics tool, and other real useful information. The posts are directed towards individuals with a personal and company Instagram accounts.
“Use Later (Latergramme) to schedule posts from a browser or use the mobile iOS app. Later sends a reminder at the scheduled time, which you can open and post via Instagram.”
Chris Karasiwiecz (@ckroks) on Social Media Examiner
INK361 - one stop shop
Understand what drives engagement and growth on Instagram.
INK361 is a web app for monitoring Instagram images on your Mac or PC. It means you can access and interact on Instagram via the web. Of all the Instagram analytics tools, INK361 is one that lets you view photos in full size.
Its main features include, but aren't limited to:
- View your own photos
- Search by user
- Search by hashtag
- Follow anyone
- Create custom groups to monitor content
- View a dashboard of the photos in your feed
- Get an overview of popular posts
- Perform an Instagram account checkup
- Find insights on your feed - engagement rate, post history, post distribution, etc.
Currently, INK361 offers a free plan, there’s a Pro Plan on the cards but as yet, it’s undetermined. The tool has recently introduced Preppr, a cool Instagram productivity tool that helps you plan, prepare, and schedule an unlimited number of posts.
“You can browse by #tag, view, and order prints like the other apps above, but you can also join cool photo challenges. There are also multiples in which you can view and organize your photos.”
- Amrik Virdi (@VirdiAmrik) on Shout Me Loud
squarelovin - free Instagram analytics tool
When's the best time to share images? When do you get most interaction?
squarelovin is Iconosquare without the price tag. It’s a tool for monitoring Instagram, offering similar features. It provides data on your followers and shows you how to optimize your Instagram performance with hashtags, filters, and posting-time suggestions. You’ll find follower growth charts and engagement stats, including top posts by likes and comments. You can also view a history of your posts broken down into year, month, day, and hour.
Not bad for a free tool!
You don’t get all the benefits of a paid tool. There’s no competitor comparison, but it is pushing towards introducing more business-oriented features, so stay tuned.
squarelovin has an awesome blog, offering social media marketing advice, Instagram news, trends, and tips targeting individual industries.
“squarelovin is a cool tool done by a German company that takes analytics from Instagram and evaluates the return on individual images, regarding revenue, traffic, conversions and clicks.”
Andreas Kitzing (@hsvandreas) founder and CEO of Sponsoo
Locowise - competitive benchmarking
Locowise describes itself as a tool which provides, "social performance measurement for agencies." It’s one of the Instagram analytics tools that helps you make data-driven decisions about what you should do, when you should schedule, and how.
Make data-driven decisions.
You’ll get social media analytics and reporting, along with in depth actionable insights across all social media channels. The Locowise lets you measure and analyze campaigns, optimize posts, and produce reports on your social media performance.
All of this data can be displayed on customizable dashboards with a drag and drop interface. These dashboards can then be shared across your enterprise with all relevant teams. Neat!
There are several price plans to suit your business needs, or you can order one-off audits and check it out before you buy.
“We used Locowise at NOW TV. It's a fantastic tool that really gives social content marketers the insight they need to communicate results to management, as well as provide data to ensure any content marketing strategy can be fuelled by insights not assumptions. I'd highly recommend it to anyone managing social content.”
Alex Packham (@alexpackham) founder of ContentCal & ASTP
Instagram analytics tools - free demo
We're sharing hundreds and thousands of images on social networks. Instagram being one of the most popular with business that offer 'pretty' products. Instagrammable products - cosmetics, fashion, flash cars and motorbikes, jewelry, art, holidays, photography, hotels, food, etc. This cracking collection of Instagram analytics tools will help you find and analyze the impact of your posts, and how to improve them.
If you’d like to dig even deeper and use - yes, biased, but it's my post - the best Instagram analytics tool out there.
Yes, you guessed it… the Talkwalker Instagram analytics tool gives you all that the above tools offer, and more. Which of your posts are winning? the growth rate of your followers. Engagement. Hashtag tracking of influencers. Give it a go!
This post has been updated to reflect recent API changes to Instagram and Facebook. Account tracking can only be done for those you own - have login credentials for. At the time of republishing, the information was correct.
